60 sea. (This is typical Earle. She is loath to talk about underwater perils or numbing ordeals. Such things are not nearly as bad as what you encounter on the streets of New York or on any highway, she says.) But in fact her dive did involve serious risks. There were hundreds of things that might have gone wrong, among them another communications failure, a failure of her air supply, and a failure of the suit's insulation. A serious leak in the suit would have subjected Sylvia to the tremendous pressure of the water at that depth-about six hundred pounds per square inch-which would have crushed her. "Sylvia really does have nerves of steel," Giddings told me later. "She and I have been on some very hairy diving expeditions together-I mean deep-water business, and long exposures, and shark situa- tions, and so on. And Sylvia is a rare combination of the scientist who's incredibly bright and artic- ulate and also very brave. She's very physical, very capable in the wa- ter, and she just knows all the parame- ters and possibilities of physiology, physics, and the mechanical aspects of what she's doing. That Jim-suit dive in Hawaii was very risky. I was very nervous about the whole thing. In fact, she and I had breakfast one morning, and I was leaning into it just a bit much. I was saying, 'What if this happens? What if that happens? ' We were getting down to some real nitty- gritty stuff, and Sylvia decided she didn't want to hear any more about it, and that was the end of our breakfast. She wasn't huffy about it. She just got up and left." H ER DEEPNEss-when I visited her one morning in her office at a company called Deep Ocean Engineer- ing, in San Leandro, just south of the Oakland Airport-was wearing a navy-blue suit, a white shirt, dark stockings, and black pumps. It was around ten o'clock, but she had already been at her office for several hours. (One secret of her success, it is ru- mored, is that she is able to get by on three or four hours' sleep, night after night. According to another rumor, she catches up on sleep at the hair- dresser's.) Her office appears designed for efficiency. It is medium-sized and fluorescent-lighted, and without win- dows, but it has a door opening toward other offices and another door opening toward the company's workshop and design studio. On one wall was a map of the world studded with hundreds of colored pushpins representing places she has dived, and on a table was a small model of a submersible called Deep Rover, which Graham Hawkes designed, and which Sylvia pioneered after its launching in June, 1984. Deep Rover is a compact, bubble-shaped craft, and it is one of the first tetherless submersibles designed to hold one per- son; most previous submersibles were much larger and heavier and held two or more people. Sylvia made a couple of brief phone calls, and then settled down to tell me something about the way her life had continued to change and expand in the late nineteen-seventies, as she became more involved with advanced marine technology. As Sylvia described her first meeting with Graham Hawkes, at the time of the Jim dive in Hawaii, it sounded like some- thing out of a romantic comedy in which the hero and heroine "meet cute." She said, "The first engineering discussion that I can remember with Graham was when I was complaining about the manipulator arm of Jim. I said, 'That stupid pincer! All I can do is reach out, and things just fly right through itsjaws! It's like having a pair of pliers on the end of a stick!' It was only later that I found out that he had designed it. I was so embarrassed. I must say that he was very good about it. And also, in talking with Graham I began to realize what a really difficult engineering challenge it is to build a manipulator that has a human arm on the inside and the pressure of the deep sea on the outside. It's no mean task." Not surprisingly, Sylvia and Gra- ham continued to talk with each other. A t first, they focussed on the goal of going still deeper in the ocean. The difficulties were-and continue to be- daunting. For one thing, a person must be able to breathe. For another thing, a diver wants to be able to function-to move about, to perform tasks, to com- municate with people on the surface -while at pressures that could prove fatal. "So I learned a lot," Sylvia said. "Even though I'd already had a lot of underwater experience, I discovered that things that sound dead simple can be extremely difficult and challenging JULY 3, 1989 and hard to overcome in an engineer- ing sense. I mean, here I was talking with this extremely creative engineer, and I would say, 'Why can't we just jump into the water and go down to the bottom of the ocean? We climb moun- tains, don't we? We go up in airplanes, don't we? We've even gone into space.' Jim was rated to go down two thousand feet-and I was just stub- born enough to say, 'O.K., why can't we build vehicles to go seven miles down-the deepest known place in the sea?' " After the Jim dive, Sylvia and Gra- ham began a correspondence, and they also bumped into each other at various gatherings. When they were in Wash- ington for the publication of "Explor- ing the Deep Frontier," while having breakfast one morning they discussed the possibility of designing a one- person submersible that would be able to travel underwater with complete freedom, unconnected to anything at the surface. Many engineers insist on tethers, since they seem to provide a strong safety factor-a sure way of hauling somebody out of the water in an emergency. But Sylvia has always disliked tethers, believing that they are more trouble than they are worth. Since they can easily get tangled or snagged, she says, they may actually be more dangerous than simply venturing out on your own. Graham began sketcþing on a napkin, and the sketch turned out to be the first involving the craft that eventually became Deep Rover. Several months later, Sylvia and Graham ran into each other at a meet- ing in San Francisco, and this time he showed her evidence of the progress he had been making in manipulator de- sign. They soon began talking serious- ly about starting a venture together- one that would focus on developing new technology to increase access to the ocean. After a good deal of soul- searching, Graham decided to leave the company he was with in England and move to the United States, and after still more soul-searching, he and Sylvia decided that the best way of achieving their goal was to forgo the usual philanthropic-grant approach- becoming dependent on foundations and so forth-and to join the free- enterprise system. In July, 1981, they pooled their re- sources and founded Deep Ocean Technology, or D.O.T. The next